Somewhere Children Shout

By John Keeler Mitchell

Roll back to the 1950s, courtesy of Somewhere Children Shout, a new retrospective by author John Keeler Mitchell, who lived it all. As he recalls, it was a time of black-and-white TV, movies where the word “damn” was used with great discretion, and computers were room-filling contraptions with whirring wheels of tape. All across America, the Boomer Generation was on the rise, and in Somewhere Children Shout, the author shares anecdotes of his own years growing up in a quintessential small town.
It was amazing, he writes. The town boasted a single traffic light. High school basketball was king. Homes had one telephone (shared). Your leash-less dog could run free. Sex was limited to a parked car (if you were 17). Dick Clarke and the “stroll” ruled in the afternoon, and AM radio filled the nights. Moms were of the live-at-home variety. And it was fun, at a scale that was a perfect fit...especially if you were a kid.
The story, in the words of a reviewer, “is a hoot.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Keeler Mitchell
• Release date: Nov 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310573927

John Keeler Mitchell

Boy writer, train freak, baseball nut and movies guy. On the heels of too many years in aerospace putting words in the mouths of the movers and shakers, I now hit the keyboard for the people. Writing has become fun and constantly new.

Book preview

Preface

You would probably be right if you concluded that people a couple of millennia ago complained about the kids down the road as being mere shadows of what they were like back in the day. And for the most part they’d have been as wrong as we are when we assess the current crop. We were all rotten kids in our own time because growing up is complex, convoluted and nearly impossible, given the demands and changes that hit us from every direction. Expectations are never clearly understood, and the battle to do the right thing is exhausting. By themselves, aspirations are a trial to even identify, let alone accomplish – if, in fact, you have any or can come up with reasons to have them. And more, you no sooner discover you live in the nest than every effort is made to expel you from it, wings or not.

I remember a great deal from those formative years, the good, the bad, and the highly questionable.

The distance of time and events, of course, tends to make recollections more benign, and I do see the old times in a gentle way. Being a kid in a small town had genuine and inherent value, and generally was a good thing. Scale and perspective, as I will credit many times later, had the major responsibility for my development, such as it was.

What struck me most in looking back was how much fun it all was, made possible more than anything else, by the freedom I had, first, to do what I wanted to – within the law – and the freedom from genuine fear. I always slept well.

John Keeler Mitchell - 2017

That’s me on the right, at age ten, with brothers Mauri and Billy, left and center. Kid brother Steve would arrive soon.

I. Small Town Culture

Chapter 1

Townsies

FOR A KID in Delhi, New York in the 1950s, the only real danger was growing up Republican. Quite beyond question, the town was that safe. No gangs, no drugs, no serial anything, the in-town speed limit was 25 mph (27 would get you a ticket), and there was just one police car and two cops who shared duties at different parts of the day. The now-defunct Saturday Evening Post once featured a cover painting of the village square, cannons and all. Kids and leash-less dogs ran free. If a guy pulled up and offered you a ride home on a rainy afternoon, you could hop in, because your dad could probably vouch for him. At the local movie theater they ran nothing but G-films – not that there was anything more lurid available (unless you happened to have your own 16-mm projector at home).

Delhi was my home from age six to nearly 17, and what follows is a collection of anecdotes that flesh out what the experience was like, an experience that is no more likely to recur in current times than the reappearance of Dwight David Eisenhower. Even Delhi itself is different now, thanks in part to Amazon where you can order all sorts of life enhancements. But back in the 1950s we really were a kinder, easier place, if you don’t consider a tinge of racism that we decided was an over-blown issue confined to the Deep South. And smack was something delivered by your mom if you farted in public. In Delhi, like countless other small American towns, the key was scale, and expectations were held low.

Looking back, the view is green lawns, two-lane streets, the practical advantage of being able to walk almost anywhere in town, and a population that you knew, even though the people struggled a bit with congeniality.

There were limitations in cold, winter months, requiring layers of clothes and few play areas. A ball field smothered in snow was disconcerting; a bike confined to the back of the garage declared that there would be months of waiting before you could sail away down the streets.

Yet the old neighborhood had genuine beauty, and most of it had just happened, without so much as a hoe being drawn, a seed thrown, or a sprinkler system turned on

A few years ago I was in Upstate, as they call it. I left the house where I had been visiting and set out for New York to rendezvous with a plane bound for California. I hit the road at about 6:30 in the morning, just in time to see mist rising from the Mohawk River, even as the new sun struck hills that were crowded with tens of thousands of hardwood trees.

It was magnificent, and I slowed the car to prolong the experience. Traffic was light and as I moved eastward I was aware of the trees coming ever closer to the road, eventually creating green walls that soared fifty to seventy feet, with the hills now rolling away in the distance.

For ten years of my early life, such could be seen from the back door. We played in the midst of that. The land – that land – had a palpable life cycle (as opposed to today being Tuesday, so tomorrow will be limited to being Wednesday), and our lives moved in accordance with it.

Delhi – pronounced phonetically – in reference to New Delhi in India, remains surrounded by small towns of similar size and temperament, all connected by two-lane roads that wind unpredictably through small hills and only slightly larger mountains. If there is any ethnicity of note it would have to be an influx of Scots from three and four generations back who found the fields familiar to their homelands.

Those were the times when you tried things on for the first time, to see if they fit and if you liked them. They were the days of acceptance and rejection, of adapting to a rhythm that worked and you could keep, and most important, of establishing the people – your friends – whom you found had a synergy with your own.

In brief ways you got to sample life, to see what happened and what the results would be with a measure of confidence, or as Mark Twain noted, …Providence protects children and idiots…I know because I have tested it. Any step over the line would simply be a matter of going to your room, by choice or directive.

The ledger is fairly well balanced. There are people and events that I am more than pleased to consign to a distant past. Others bring contented memories and value, as well as learning that has remained, times that even now have worth and pertinence. So the sorting out has value, and maybe an assignation of weight. We’ll see.

By some rude definition, I was a townsie, which is to say that my home was in the village per se, where I could prowl the streets at will; this as opposed to living on one of the dozens of dairy farms that existed at our borders.

I was glad of that because I have never, ever liked cows: The very idea of those manure-caked animals being a food source on several levels was repugnant, though damn it all, few things compare with a great New York steak (that notion was later eased by a friend who said that you get steaks from the super market where they are encased in cellophane). Then too, those of us who lived in cosmopolitan Delhi had little interest in the actual work that our farm-born classmates were obliged to do, plus there was the never spoken opinion that they were rather crude. And more, we could head downtown on a whim, whereas they had to show up in pickup trucks only on Friday nights – the one time the stores would be open past six.

There were times, of course, when I envied the kids who were chauffeured to school via a yellow bus, while Dad refused to cave to my pleas for curb service.

It all looked so easy and convenient, especially on mornings when the snow came up to your knees. You could sit in the house and wait until the bus appeared a hundred yards down the road and then run out for the perfect rendezvous. But on further reflection, that scenario required a farmhouse that would be situated beside a barn…wherein the manure-caked animals lived. Not good. And thus, trudging was in order.

Notwithstanding, in the 1950s the dairy business was the support factor for the town (as the 21st Century warms up, I can’t imagine what keeps the townsies alive); a common sight was gleaming tankers that carried milk to creameries in the area. We were all aware of that, and a portion of the money that was generated ended up in the collection plate on Sunday morning (I’ll explain later).

So I was a townsie, with a legitimate street address, and I rather liked it. But the story did not actually start there. The first port-of-call that memory serves was in New Jersey in another town that was smaller even than Delhi, God forbid, and was the site of a name change of my own devising.

Chapter 2

On the move

From age five they called me Jack.

That was despite the fact that my given name was John, but the choice – and the preference -- was mine. We lived only a few hundred yards from the school, where I had grown into the practice of re-tying the shoes of every kid who would tolerate it, this on the heels of being shown the craft by my older brother, Mauri. Not a long way into the kindergarten experience, I was on my way home and happened to notice two rather burly characters doing what you do to create a ditch. One called the other Bill, and Bill called his friend by the name of Jack. Wow. I was impressed, and told my parents such when I arrived home, and added that hereafter I, too, would like to be known as Jack – not John. Since the change would cost nothing, they both agreed.

The note that I took to my teacher the next day must have been an eye-opener.

That was one of my earliest recollections as a five-year-old in Milford, New Jersey, a town of perhaps 1,500 people, and perched on the east bank of the Delaware River, midway between Philadelphia and New York. Mauri, two years older, was both my mentor and chief instigator. Under his tutelage I learned how to drink LePage’s glue (no ill effects) and how to pick a hole through the plaster of our bedroom wall and crawl inside same (completely baffling my grandmother during a visit). On my own I managed to play doctor with a girl of similar age from next door, streak the neighborhood while leaving my clothes in the front yard, and carry (rather than tow), a sled up a hill, this to wisely avoid the roots that protruded through the snow. Dad rolled his eyes at that one.

When I reached age six we moved to another house in the middle of town where my dad celebrated Christmas morning by backing his black Plymouth over my brand new sled. He was pleased that I was not on it at the time, although if anyone had asked me I would have questioned how I was about to ride the newly smashed mess of wood and metal runners.

It was a tough year for me. Just two months earlier I had suffered my first humiliation by racing home at mid-morning break from 1st Grade class to don my costume for the planned Halloween ceremonies back at school. Problem was, the instructions were to do so during the lunch hour. Oh so tearfully I returned to school at lunch in my ghost costume, clutching a by-now tear-soaked note from Mom, doubtlessly explaining to my teacher the actions of her over-eager son.

That same year, 1948, Mauri and I failed to tunnel our way to China in the back yard, even though Dad encouraged us to just keep on digging. A dog that Mauri was convinced we should keep and name Rover wandered into the back yard and Dad simply could not say no. Then too, he may have been recalling with some regret the punishment I had received after entertaining a group of ladies from the church who had gathered on the front porch. I’d launched some colorful words that Mauri (again) and I had picked up from a rough character who cruised the main street on a motorcycle. (For that indiscretion, Mauri and I were banished to our bedroom, whereupon we decided that Mom should find herself at the mercy of the Germans.)

Rover stayed with the family.

*

Rover, moreover, was in the back seat of the Plymouth in the spring of 1949 when my dad moved his family and his career as a Presbyterian minister from Milford to Delhi, a town that was only slightly larger. He was prompted by the promise – fulfilled – of a larger salary and a new flock of the faithful. Maurice Mitchell (Sr.) was just 35, with three sons in tow. He and Mom – the former Alice Jane Shimp -- had been married in 1939 and were familiar with small towns from day one. For all practical purposes, their own lives had begun and been nurtured in the rural context, and before them, their parents had also been from small town America in the 19th century.

For my dad, there was an apparent preference to be apart from large metropolitan areas. He was certainly a devoted Christian preacher, but leaned toward things on a limited scale. The sprawling church with a large congregation and commensurate staff had almost no appeal for him, and he felt comfortable in communities that reflected that. Hence, and in order, he worked from pulpits in North Girard, Pennsylvania (population then of 1,200), Milford, New Jersey, next Delhi (2,500), and followed by Ilion, New York, which by 1959 was home to 10,000 residents.

When Dad retired from the parish ministry in the late 1970s, he and Mom moved to California where he continued in the Presbyterian Church in administrative and ministerial supply work. At the age of 95 he finally hung up his robe and then died a year later.

So from the start, Dad found that the feel of a small church was much to his liking, along with the small towns that were connected. The largest congregation he ever served was 600 members, in towns that typically had no more than three or four traffic signals.

When I left the nest, my first inclination was to head for anything but, and turned my attention westward toward the nearest big city I could find, which turned out to be Syracuse. Two years later I was on Route 66, bound for California, never to return to villages with stores that closed at dusk, or blue laws of one severity or another. And to this day, I marvel slightly at being able to pick up a loaf of bread at two in the morning. I haven’t bought a set of snow tires since Lyndon Johnson was president.

Still, the attractiveness – if not the supposed innocence – of the small town where I spent the larger part of my formative years remains. But there’s not a part of me that sees a return to the rural life, and I have always wondered how I would have been different if I had been reared in a truly cosmopolitan